“I still get the feeling that there could be a station on the other side of the street, and there’s so many people going by that news of it just doesn’t make it through.”
“You underestimate the ability of people to act like idiots,” he said. “Believe me, we’d know.”
“All right,” she said, so quietly that Ernest almost didn’t hear her. “You’re the boss. Just tell me what to do.”
There was a promise implicit in her tone, one that made Ernest feel a subdued excitement. “It’s nice to have additional incentive,” he thought. He turned around and looked at her. She smiled, without the cynicism she had shown earlier.
Ernest thought about the women he had been close to in his life. He wasn’t proud of all the relationships he had formed; he knew that he often used women, manipulated their emotions as he had done with the fuser. But it always seemed to him that while he was doing that, the woman was using him for something as well. He had never exploited anyone, at least without getting the feeling that the process had been mutual. Of course, relationships like that were based on far different qualities than love or respect. But why should that make them less worthwhile? They fulfilled certain needs—needs that, healthy or not, had to be fulfilled. He knew that this girl, whom he had met under such evil circumstances, would likely provide that oddly businesslike sort of affair. But, given the chance, it could always change into something more emotional. So far, the people in charge of giving away the chances were being somewhat less than cooperative.
“We won’t get ten blocks by nightfall at this rate,” said the girl.
Meanwhile 4
It was late afternoon, and already the sun was melting behind the hotel across the square. Ernst sipped wine now, for he appreciated the effect of the slanting sun’s rays on the rich, dark liquid. He had discovered this by accident when he had first come to the city, strolling along the single, huge avenue. He had seen the red shimmers reflecting on the impassive face of a shopworn gourgandine. How much better, he had thought then, how much better it would be to have that singular fortunate play of light grace a genuine poet.
“It may be a bit naive of me, nonetheless,” he thought. “After all, if these loiterers of the city lack the verbal sophistication to appreciate the verses themselves, how can I expect them to have any greater regard for the wielder of the pen? But I must defeat that argument, by ignoring it if by no more rigorous means. I cannot allow myself to be pulled down into the intellectual miasma of these Afric prisoners. The sun must burn out all wonder and delight at an early age; it is only we unlucky travelers who can deplore their sand-worn ignorance.” He took some more of the wine and held it in his mouth until he began to feel foolish. He swallowed it and pushed the glass away.
While Ernst sat there, sucking the taste of the wine from his teeth, a young boy walked by on the sidewalk. He was small, nearly hairless, and quite obviously strayed from the neighborhood of his parents. He stopped when he saw Ernst. “Ayah, are you not Weinraub the wanderer, from Europe?”
“I am,” said Ernst. “I have been, for some time. Has my fame then spread as far as your unwashed ears?”
“I have heard much about you, akkei,” said the boy. “I never believed that I’d really see you.”
“And are your dreams confirmed?”
“Not yet,” said the boy, shaking his head. “Do you really kiss men?”
Ernst spat at the boy, and the dark boy laughed, dancing into the street, hopping back on the sidewalk. “Come here,” said Ernst, “and I’ll wrap this chair around your skinny neck.”
“It was only a joke, akkei,” said the boy, not the least afraid.
“A joke. How old are you?”
“I am nine, akkei.”
“Then you should know the danger in mocking such as I. I will draw a picture of you. I will touch you with my left hand. Your mother will beat you dead when she hears.”
“You are wrong,” said the boy, laughing again. “You are a Nazarene, yes, or a Jew. But I am no rug-squatter. Touch me with your left hand, akkei, and I will gnaw it off. Do you wish me to fetch your supper? I will not charge you this time.”
“I tend to doubt your offer. In any event, I have a regular boy who brings my food. What is your name, you young criminal?”
“I am Kebap,” said the boy. “It means ‘roast beef’ in the language of Turkey.”
“I can see why,” said Ernst dryly. “You will have to work hard to take the place of my regular boy, if you want his job.”
“I am sorry,” said Kebap. “I have no wish to perform that kind of service.” Then he ran away, shouting insults over his shoulder. Ernst stared after him, his hands clenching.
“Ieneth will pay for her sport,” he thought. “If only I could find a vulnerable spot in these people. Without possessions, inured against discomfort, hoping for nothing, they are difficult indeed to injure. Perhaps that is the reason I have stayed in this capital of lice so long. No other reason comes quickly to mind.”
He sipped his wine again, and stared at the smudged handwriting on a scrap of paper: an ébauche of his trilogy of novels. He had done the rough outline so long ago that he had forgotten its point. But he was certain that the wine waves shifted to good effect on the yellowed paper, too.
“This was the trilogy that was going to make my name,” thought Ernst sadly. “I remember how I had planned to dedicate the first volume to Eugenie, the second to Marie, and the third…? I can’t remember, after all. It has been a long time. I cannot even recall the characters. Ah, yes, here. I had stolen that outstanding, virtuous fool, d’Aubont, put a chevalier’s outfit on him, taken off his moustache, and renamed him Gerhardt Friedlos. How the ladies’ fluttering hearts of Germany, Carbba, France, and England were to embrace him, if hearts are capable of such a dexterous feat. Friedlos. Now I remember. And there is no further mystery as to why I can’t recall the plot. It was nothing. Mere slicings of rapier, mere wooings of maid, mere tauntings of coward. One thousand pages of adolescent dreams, just to restore my manly figure. Beyond the dedications, did I not also represent Eugenie and Marie with characters? I cannot read this scrawl. Ah, yes. Eugenie is disguised in Volume One as the red-haired Marchioness Fajra. She is consumed in a horrible holocaust as her outraged tenants wreak their just revenge. Friedlos observes the distressing scene with mixed emotions. In Volume Two, he consoles himself with the contrasting charms of Marie, known in my fiction as the maid Malvarma, who pitiably froze to death on the great plain of Breulandy rather than acknowledge her secret love. Friedlos comes upon her blue and twisted corpse and grieves. I am happy, I am very, very happy that I never wrote that trash.”
Ernst took a short, fat pencil and wrote in the narrow spaces left to him on the scrap. “My scalp itches,” he wrote. “When I scratch it, I break open half-healed sores. I have a headache; behind my right eye, my brain throbs. My ears are blocked, and the canals are swollen deep inside, as though large pegs had been hammered into them. My nostrils drip constantly, and the front of my face feels like it is filled with sand. My gums bleed, and my teeth communicate with stabbing pains. My tongue is still burned from the morning tea. My throat is dry and sore.” This catalogue continued down the margins of the paper, and down his body, to end with, “My arches cramp up at regular intervals, whenever I think about them. My toes are cut and painful on the bottom, and fungused and itching between. And now I believe that it pains me to piss. But this last symptom bears watching; it is not confirmed.”
On a napkin stained with rings of chocolate and coffee, Ernst began another list, parallel to the first. “The very continents shudder with the fever-chills of war. Europe, my first home so far away, cringes in the dark sickroom between the sea and the Urals. Asia teeters toward the false adolescence of senility, and is the more dangerous for it. Breulandy rises in the north and east, and who can tell of her goals and motives? South of the city Africa slumbers, unpopulated and sterile, under the cauterizing sun. The Americas? Far too large to colonize
, to control, to aid us now.
“Oh, and whom do I mean by ‘us’? The world is fractured so that we no longer know anything but self. My self finds symptoms everywhere, a political hypochondriac in exile. Perhaps if I were still in the numbing academic life of old, I would see none of this: Otio sepoltura del l’uomo vivo—‘inactivity is the tomb of the vital man.’ I have time to make lists, now.”
Of course, he found sad significance in the two inventories when they were completed. He shook his head sorrowfully, and stared meditatively at his wineglass, but no one noticed.
Ernst folded the paper with his trilogy synopsis and the first list, and put it back into his pocket. He skimmed through the second list again, though. ” ‘I have time to make lists, now,’ ” he read. “What does that mean? Who am I trying to distress?” Just beyond the railing, on the sidewalk bordering the Fée Blanche, sat Kebap, the little boy named “roast beef.” The boy was grinning.
” ‘Allo, akkei Weinraub. I’m back. I’ve come to haunt you, you know.”
“You’re doing a fine job,” said Ernst. “Do you know anything of poetry?”
“I know poetry,” said the boy. “I know what akkei Courane writes. That’s poetry. That’s what everyone says. Do you write poetry, too?”
“In my youth,” said Ernst.
“It is lucky, then, that I cannot read,” said Kebap. He grinned again at Ernst, evilly. “I see that your usual boy hasn’t yet brought your supper.”
“Why are you called ‘roast beef’? I doubt if you’ve ever seen any in your whole life.”
“One of my uncles called me that,” said the boy. “He said that’s what I looked like when I was born.”
“Do you have a lot of uncles?” asked Ernst maliciously.
Kebap’s eyes opened very wide. “Oh, certainly,” he said solemnly. “Sometimes a new one every day. My mother is very beautiful, very wise, and often very silent. Would you like to meet her, akkei?”
“Not today, you little thief.” Ernst held up the annotated napkin. “I’m very busy.”
Kebap snorted. “Certainly, akkei,” he said. “Of course.” Then he ran away again.
“Good evening, M. Weinraub.” It was Czerny, still dressed in his gray uniform of the Citizens’ Army. Ernst saw that the tunic was without decoration or indication of rank. Perhaps the Gaish was still so small that the men had only two or three officers in the whole organization. And here was the man again, to convince him that the situation was not foolish after all.
“You are a man of your word, M. Czerny,” said Ernst. “Will you join me again? Have a drink?”
“No, I’ll have to pass that up,” said Czerny as he seated himself at Ernst’s table. “I trust your appointment concluded satisfactorily?”
Ernst grunted. It became evident that he would say nothing more. Czerny cursed softly. “Look,” he said, “I don’t want to have to go through all these stupid contests of yours. This isn’t a kind of amusement any longer. You’re going to have to choose sides. If you’re not with us, you’re against us.”
Ernst was amused by the man’s grave talk. He couldn’t understand the urgency at all. “Whom are you going to fight? I don’t see it. Maybe if you paid them enough, you could hire some Arabs. But it’s still a good distance to ask them to ride just for a battle. Or maybe if you split your tiny bunch in half, one part could start a civil uprising and the other part could put it down. But I really just want to watch.”
Perhaps it was the heat of the afternoon, or the amount of liquor he had already taken, or the annoying events of the day, but Ernst refused to allow Czerny the pleasure of making a single argumentative point. It was not often that someone came to Ernst with a request, and he was certainly going to take the opportunity to enjoy it fully. That in doing so he would have to disappoint and even antagonize Czerny made little difference. If Czerny wanted Ernst’s help badly enough, Czerny would return again. And if Czerny didn’t mean what he said, then, well, he deserved everything Ernst could devise.
“We will get nowhere, Monsieur,” said Czerny in a tight, controlled voice, “until you cease treating my army as a toy and our cause as a tilting at windmills.”
“My good Czerny,” said Ernst slowly, “you reveal quite a lot when you say ‘my army.’ You reveal yourself, if you understand me. You divulge yourself. You display yourself, do you see? You expose yourself. There, I see that I must say it plainly. You expose yourself, but in this locality, at this time, that seems to be a most commendable form of expression.”
“Damn it, you are an idiot! I’m not asking you to be a dirty goundi. We can get plenty of infantry by just putting up notices. If we could afford to pay them. If we could afford the notices. But intelligence is at a premium in this city. We need you and the others like you. I promise you, you’ll never have to carry a rifle or face one. But you have to be man enough to cast your lot with us, or we’ll sweep you aside with the rest of the old ways.”
“Rhetoric, Czerny, rhetoric!” said Ernst, giggling drunkenly. “I came here to get away from all that. Leave me alone will you? I sit here and drink. I don’t interfere with you while you play soldiers. I’m not any more useful than you, but at least I don’t bother anybody.”
Ernst looked around him, hoping that some diversion might arise to rescue him. There was nothing. Perhaps he might cause enough of a row with Czerny that M. Gargotier would ask that they both leave; the danger with that plan was that Czerny would be sure to invite Ernst somewhere, some place where Czerny and his Gaish held an edge. Well, then, something simpler was necessary. Perhaps the young nuisance would return. With any luck, the boy would change his target; Czerny would be in no mood to ignore Kebap. But that didn’t seem likely, either.
Czerny banged the little table with his fist. The table’s metal top flipped off its three legs, dumping Ernst’s wineglass to the ground. Czerny didn’t appear to notice. He talked on through the crashing of the table and the breaking of the glass. “Useful! You want to talk about useful? Have you ever read anything about politics? Economics? You know what keeps a culture alive?”
“Yes,” said Ernst sullenly, while M. Gargotier cleaned up the mess. “People not bothering other people.”
“A good war every generation or so,” said Czerny, ignoring Ernst, seeing him now as an enemy. “We’ve got authorities. Machiavelli said that the first cause of unrest in a nation is idleness and peace. That’s all this city has ever known, and you can see the results out there.” Czerny waved in the direction of the street. All that Ernst could see was a young woman in a short leather skirt, naked from the waist up. She met his glance and waved.
“Ah,” thought Ernst, “it has been a long time since I have been able just to sit and watch those lovely girls. It seems that one should have the right to do that, without fear of interruption. But there is always war, disease, jealousies, business, always hunger. I have asked for little in my life. Indeed, all that I would have now is a quiet place in the Faubourg St.-Honoré to watch the Parisian girls. Instead, here I am. But that single distant brown woman is infinitely preferable to listening to Czerny’s ranting.” Ernst smiled at the half-naked woman; she turned away for a moment. A small boy had been standing behind her. The woman whispered in the boy’s ear. Ernst recognized the boy, of course; he laughed. It would not be long before Kebap learned that even industry and enterprise would avail him nothing in that damned city.
“You cannot afford silence,” said Czerny loudly.
“Ah,” said Ernst unhappily, “I hadn’t realized your thing had gotten this involved. I really thought you fellows were just showing off. But it’s a whole lot worse than that. Well, I won’t disturb you, if that’s what you’re worried about. I still don’t see why you’re so anxious to have me. I haven’t held a rifle since my partridge-shooting days in Madrid.”
“You aren’t even listening,” said Czerny, his voice low and outraged.
“No, I guess I’m not. What is it again that you want?”
&nbs
p; “We want you to join us.”
Ernst smiled sadly, looking down at his new glass of wine. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t make decisions any more.”
Czerny stood up. He kicked a shard of the broken wineglass into the street. “You’re wrong,” he said. “You’ve just made a very bad one.”
CHAPTER 9
Ernest shaded his eyes with his hand and looked through the crack between the boards. “I don’t even know why they bothered putting up these planks,” he said to Darlaine, his new partner. “If they thought they’d help protect the windows, that’s pretty stupid. These windows aren’t going to be much good against the Representative’s disaster. Hell, no matter what happens, everybody tries to hang on to what they have.”
“That figures,” said Darlaine, tossing her long hair over her shoulder. “I can understand it. Sometimes you’re just too critical. I mean, this is a weird situation. You can’t knock people for acting strange.”
“Sure I can,” said Ernest. “I see somebody moving around in there. Hand me that chunk of rock.” Darlaine bent to pick up the rock he pointed to; Ernest turned around and watched the slowly moving river of people in the street. “They’re going to wear themselves out like that,” he thought. “If I can hold on until they start dropping, I’ll have the city to myself.”
“Here, is this O.K.?”
“Fine,” he said, taking the rock. “Move back a little. Don’t get caught in the crowd. It’s like an undertow; I’ll never see you again.”
Darlaine smiled, then chewed her lip. “Would that bother you?” she said at last.
“A little. Yeah.” Ernest picked a place where the gap between the boards was at its widest, about three inches. He held the rock in both hands and began pounding. Slivers of wood split from the boards, but they held fast. He raised the rock above his head and hit the wood as hard as he could. He repeated the blow several times; the planks didn’t move, but he heard the musical cracking of glass. “I think I got the window. That ought to get them out.” He continued to strike at the wooden barrier.
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